HyperConvergence

A 2-node hyperconverged cluster is useful in branch office where you need high availability or for small infrastructure. With 2-node hyperconverged solution, you don’t need to leverage a NAS or a SAN for the shared storage. So, the hardware footprint is reduced and the manageability is improved because hyperconverged solution are easier to use than standard infrastructure with SAN. VMware ...

When building a hyperconverged solution, the CPU is the most important part. This component defines the number of vCPU supported by your infrastructure and so, defined the number of servers to deploy. Today we can install hundreds of RAM in GB, and dozens of storage in TB. Compared to these components the number of CPU is small. So, a bigger ...

Last week, Microsoft announced the final release of Windows Server 2016 (the bits can be downloaded here). In addition, Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2016 supports now a 2-node hyperconverged cluster configuration. I can now publish the setup of my lab configuration which is almost a production platform. Only SSD are not enterprise grade and one Xeon is missing per ...

In a previous topic, I have described how to deploy a VMware vSAN cluster. VMware vSAN enables to create a hyperconverged cluster in the vSphere environment. The last time we saw how to deploy this cluster by configuring, ESXi hosts, distributed switch and the storage. Now that the cluster is working, we can deploy VMs inside the vSAN datastore. To ...

As Microsoft, VMware has a Software-Defined Storage solution called vSAN which is currently in version 6.2. This solution enables to aggregate local device storages as mechanical disks or SSD and create a highly available datastore. There are two deployment models: hybrid solution and full-flash solution. In hybrid solution, you must have flash cache devices and mechanical cache devices (SAS or ...

The last two months, I worked with my friend Charbel Nemnom on a whitepaper about Hyper-Convergence, especially by using Microsoft technologies. First of all, this document contains an overview of the IT infrastructure improvement in the last ten years past from before virtualization to Hyper-Convergence. Then we describe how works Microsoft Hyper-Converged solution by talking about Network convergence, RDMA, SMB, Storage Spaces Direct, ...

Thanks to Windows Server 2016, we will able to implement HyperConverged infrastructure. This marketing word means that storage, network and compute components will be installed locally on servers. So in this solution, there is no need SAN. Instead the Storage Spaces Direct solution will be used (for further information please read this topic). In this topic I’ll describe how to deploy ...